Open your brand guidelines. If you see words like "friendly," "human," "approachable," and "straightforward," congratulations—you've described the absolute minimum bar for not actively repelling your audience.
You haven't created a distinctive voice: These are not really unique voice attributes; they’re baseline requirements for communication competence.
I can’t count how many brand onboarding sessions I’ve sat through with clients where I’ve smiled politely while they patiently explained that their brand is uniquely human-sounding. A quick online search for public brand guidelines and I find more examples easily:
These are the marketing equivalent of saying your personality trait is "having a pulse." And I can’t help but wonder, what brands want to be unfriendly, unapproachable, aloof, jargon-filled, or robotic?!
You see, that’s the thing about real attributes: You should be able to imagine the opposite being an option too. For example, I can imagine a brand choosing levity, humour, and glibness. But I can also imagine a brand saying that’s not the approach: They want to hold space for gravitas, sincerity, and even profundity.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with these ubiquitous brand attributes. This isn’t an argument to stop incorporating these ideas in your writing. But in my opinion, you need something more.
When every brand sounds like a friendly but professional clone, none are memorable. Your carefully crafted content becomes part of the amorphous blob that audiences scroll past without a second thought. And in an attention economy, being forgotten is fatal.
AI only compounds this problem. When everyone can generate competent, professional content at scale, the sea of sameness becomes an ocean. Without voice distinction, you're competing on volume and distribution alone—a race to the bottom that favors the biggest budgets, not the best ideas.
Words drive action. Your language patterns directly impact how people respond to your calls to action, your value propositions, and your product messaging.
Bland voice doesn't just fail to stand out—it fails to move. It creates no emotional resonance, no compelling reason to choose you over alternatives. It's the marketing equivalent of a limp handshake when what you need is a bear hug or a high five.
This becomes especially problematic if you’re a challenger brand that’s supposed to be shaking up a category and standing apart from the same old, same old. When your voice is indistinguishable from competitors, you're communicating that there's nothing particularly distinctive about your thinking and product offering either.
Why should customers believe your product is special when your communication is anything but?
If you’ve been reading this and thinking, “shit, it me,” let’s talk about how to bust out of bland into something you can truly hold onto as a unique attribute and that you can train others on.
Any brand exercise is partly about looking in the mirror: You want to reflect something true about yourself, not just role-play sounding like somebody else. So assemble stuff that sounds essentially yours. This could be a CEO’s All Hands talk, blog posts, snippets of website copywriting, podcast transcripts that feature some of your more flag-bearing leaders, etc.
I’m going to use Claude for this, but you can use any AI you like. Start with a prompt like this:
Hey Claude, Today I want to do a voice and tone exercise for the [company] brand. Our current voice and tone is [attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3], but we want to build beyond that and articulate something really unique.
To that end, I’m going to share a bunch of samples of various [blogs, podcasts, webinars]. I want you to analyze these and look for common voice attributes that you think we could dial into to help our brand stand truly apart from the competition.
[add attachments]
In response to this, your AI should respond with a list of attributes. You’ll like some of them, and think some are too idiosyncratic to the examples you gave. Others might be interesting but harder to imagine bringing to life across the entire brand (they may be too closely tied to one specific individual, for example).
For example: When I shared a bunch of my blogs with Claude, here’s the list of attributes and descriptors it pulled from my writing voice:
I’d usually chat a little bit more with Claude about what I liked or disliked from each of its answers before moving to the next step. For this example, I told it I really liked the first two attributes on this list but that I wanted it to stay in brand attributes territory and pull back from writing guidelines at this point.
The next step is the part of brand work that ‘looks out the window’ instead of into the mirror: You want to think more aspirationally now. What are some voices that you would really love to emulate?
Get out of your marketing lizard brain here. Resist reaching for those brands inside your bubble. Think more broadly: Maybe you’d love to inject your brand with a little like Phoebe from Friends. Or like Jon Stewart. Or Ryan Reynolds. Maybe there’s a magazine writer, Substacker, podcaster, or celebrity whose voice feels very aligned with your brand.
Pull examples (but do take care that they’re good examples of what you want. Remember with AI: Junk in/junk out) and then follow up in the same conversation with a prompt like this:
Okay. Now let’s push it even further. I’m going to share a bunch of external sources, including:
- A [podcast] transcript from [name]
- A [book excerpt] from [author]
- A list of the [best quotes] from [TV character]
- etc.
There’s some shared essence to all these that I’d like to incorporate into our voice attributes. They could be finesses on the existing attributes or new complementary ones…
Can you analyze these and mash them up with the last answer to come up with a new list that shows an original ‘blended’ voice that we would be appropriate for [company] but push us further into uniqueness?
Continuing the example: For Digital Sisco, I shared an excerpt from a Brene Brown book and Jon Stewart’s speech at the Sanity Rally with Claude using this prompt as a follow-up to my initial prompt. It came back with a more refined list of attributes, saying:
“The Stewart speech and Brown excerpt provide rich new dimensions that complement our existing attributes beautifully.” It then went on to list our now-evolved voice attributes:
Okay, let’s pause here and just recognize how much better this is as a writing manual than those bland no-brainer attributes (and imagine building your brand profile with these in Claude or Lex!) The real magic here is in the blend of mirror/window thinking: You started with something you already have and then added it to with these aspirational voices. But we’re not done yet!
Now we want to really drill into distinctiveness within our category. There’s always that competitor every business is a little too aware of— always taking a measure of their channels, their creative, their web pages. There may even be internal pressure just to emulate them.
You want to resist this temptation and actually pull away. This final prompt will ensure you’re not just unconsciously (or consciously) trying to inch closer to your competition.
It could go something like:
Okay. I have one last "test" for our new attributes. I want to share a competitor's content. We want to stand apart from this [competitor name].
So I want you to identify any attributes that might be overlapping too much with their natural voice and tone and frame/reframe our attributes to stand apart (removing some if necessary).
In addition, create some “do nots” that you think we should avoid to be distinctive from [competitor name].
I picked Kieran Flanagan’s LinkedIn posts. He’s not a competitor of Digital Sisco’s (we wish!) but he is somebody whose content I consume and often align with. So, it’s fun to think about how we can be not him, even though we love him!
Here’s what Claude came back with this time for Digital Sisco's differentiating voice elements
I want to pause here and note that this work could traditionally take weeks, and these steps have taken about an hour. Even if you’re not fully happy with the outputs yet, remember where we started and where we’ve got to within the space of a blog post. This is insane, especially when you consider a person who isn’t a branding expert could now follow this playbook.
But the last step is to put it all together. Here’s a prompt:
Okay, now let's put it all together.
Take the attributes we loved from the "Evolved Voice Attributes" inspired by [inspiration sources] and layer in the stuff we want to pull away from in [competitor’s] work.
Let's land a final set of attributes with both positive examples (do this, like [inspiration]) and ones we want to avoid (not this, like [competition]).
Try to really whittle it down to 3-4 core brand attributes that are elastic enough to apply to different kinds of assets, from blog posts, web copywriting, email marketing and social copy, etc.
Finally, keep in mind who we're trying to reach and resonate with: [snappy articulation of ICP]
Here’s what I got back for Digital Sisco when I ran this prompt:
Truth-telling as an Act of Hope(…and so on for the remaining three attributes.)
💡Remember: The key is to engage and interrogate AI until you get something you really love. This is as active as brainstorming with other people; you can’t just passively accept the first answers.
Before you jump to shipping new writing guidelines, take a moment to stress test. If you have recurring freelancers, ask them to rewrite a few paragraphs of recent copy/content using these guidelines and see if what’s coming back is working for you. Do the same exercise with your own writing.
Remember: Brand lives (or dies) with every execution, so while these things may look great in guidelines, you need to be able to bring them to life at scale.
While you’re at it, stress test with AI too. Give Claude a current blah blog post and ask it to take a stab at rewriting it using these principles. See if you like the direction it takes. It will still need editing and reining in. But overall, do you think there’s a new and distinct “vibe” coming off your copy?
Developing a distinctive brand voice doesn't mean locking yourself into a single tone for every piece of content. The most effective brands understand that voice needs elasticity—the ability to move along the creative spectrum depending on the context, while still remaining recognizably "you."
Your voice needs a clear centre of gravity, but it also needs the range to adapt to different situations without losing its essential character. This isn't inconsistency; it's understanding that different contexts require different expressions of the same core identity.
I’ve written about this elasticity in my blog about The Creative Spectrum if you want to learn more.
Remember that the overall brand experience doesn’t just come from one brand element. It’s how everything works together. Visuals support copy, and one can retreat when the other steps forward. This strategic flexibility is what separates sophisticated brand voice from simplistic "always be friendly" guidelines.
The key is making deliberate choices about what elements lean out and what ones lean in for any given execution.
Having distinctive voice guidelines is only half the battle. The real challenge comes in executing that voice consistently across teams, channels, and time. The solution isn't to abandon voice distinction and retreat to the safe middle—it's to approach voice with the same systematic thinking we apply to other brand elements:
At Digital Sisco, we've helped dozens of brands escape bland content syndrome and develop voices and blogs that actually stand out., resonate deeply with their ICP, rank for search and LLMs, and - most importantly - CONVERT!
Our voice development process goes beyond vague descriptors to create distinctive, reproducible language patterns that work for human writers and AI collaborators alike. Let's talk.